Click it and ticket

Click it and ticket

Girard Mayor Jim Melfi was right, and we were wrong. Contracting traffic enforcement to a private company that takes pictures of speeding cars and tells the city which car owners ought to be fined is legal under Ohio law. The Supreme Court of Ohio says so.

We suppose we should be mortified, but we’re not.

Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right. And Girard’s traffic camera was wrong for any number of reasons.

First among them was that it was a sham. Proponents of the camera maintained that it was a safety device, but it was far more of a revenue machine than a traffic cop. How do we know that? Because we saw the signs alerting motorists to the fact that speed limits in Girard were enforced by surveillance cameras. Little signs were attached to poles on busy Route 422 leading into the city, signs that you had to watch for to spot and slow down to read.

If a city father wanted to end speeding in his town, he’d put up billboards warning motorists to slow down. If he wanted to help a private company maximize their shared income through video surveillance, he’d put up tiny signs and say, “See, we’re warning people because we don’t want them speeding through our town.”

Second, speed traps and traffic cameras are a chamber of commerce’s worst enemy. Some of the people who have to drive through your town will slow down. Some won’t and will get tickets. And lots of the others will simply find a way around you.

Third — and the Ohio Supreme Court didn’t address this — commercially produced traffic tickets are not part of a transparent system with the sort of safeguards against favoritism that state law provides when a traditional traffic ticket is issued by a police officer and enforced in open court.

One more detail

But the Ohio Supreme Court has spoken, and we suspect that companies are champing at the bit, ready to come into the state offering cash-strapped cities easy money. The only thing that stands in their way now is a question that must be answered in federal court. The Ohio Supreme Court noted that there are due process questions regarding traffic camera citations, but that those questions were not within the domain of the state court.

Maybe we’ll be right after all. Motorists can only hope so.